Empty Rooms
Chapter eight
Annette
Jamie Walker has been gone for three hours, and I’ve already walked toward his room twice. The first time, I make it all the way to the doorway before I remember.
The second time, I stop halfway down the hall with a blood pressure cuff in one hand and absolutely no reason to be standing there.
Room 312 is empty.
Not abandoned. Hospitals do not leave rooms empty long enough for that. The bed has been stripped. The water pitcher is gone. The chair where Coach sat through most of the week has been pushed back against the wall. Fresh linens wait in a neat stack on the counter for whoever comes next.
It looks exactly like the way a hospital room should look after a patient goes home.
So why does it feel wrong?
“Lose something?”
I turn. Keisha stands behind me with her arms folded over her pale blue scrubs. Her dark eyebrows are raised, and there is a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Completely.”
She looks past me into the empty room. “Because you’ve been staring in there for a full twenty seconds.”
“I was checking to make sure housekeeping finished.”
Keisha nods slowly. “Naturally.”
“They did.”
“I can see that.”
“So, there’s no problem.”
“Didn’t say there was.”
Her smile gets wider. I turn away before she can see mine and say: “Don’t you have patients?”
“I do. One of them is asleep, one is waiting for transport, and one has spent the last twenty minutes telling his daughter that he does not need help putting on socks.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“It should. Apparently stubborn men travel in packs.”
I start toward the nurses’ station. Keisha falls into step beside me. “You miss your hockey player.”
I nearly drop the cuff. “He was not MY hockey player.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“He was a patient.”
“A patient you argued with before breakfast every morning.”
“He ignored instructions before breakfast every morning.”
“A patient who made you smile while explaining breathing exercises.”
“I did not smile.”
Keisha stops walking.
I take two more steps before realizing she is no longer beside me. When I turn, she is staring at me with the flat expression nurses reserve for patients who insist their pain is a two while gripping the bedrail hard enough to leave fingerprints.
“Annette.”
“What?”
“You smiled while explaining medications.”
“That proves nothing.”
“Honey, nobody smiles while explaining medications.”
I press my lips together.
She points at me. “That. Right there. You’re doing it again.”
“I am not.”
“You absolutely are.”
I turn toward the station, but Keisha catches my elbow. “Break room. Five minutes.”
“I have charting.”
“You always have charting.”
“I have rounds.”
“You finished rounds.”
“I have—”
“A suspicious emotional attachment to an empty hospital room?”
I stare at her. Keisha grins. “Break room.”
Five minutes later, I’m sitting across from her at a tiny table with a paper cup of coffee I do not remember pouring.
The break room smells like burnt coffee, reheated soup and the lemon cleaner housekeeping uses on every flat surface in the building. Someone has left half a birthday cake in the refrigerator with DO NOT THROW AWAY written across the box in three different colors of marker.
Keisha peels the lid from a yogurt container and studies me over the rim.
I know that look. I’ve seen her use it on patients, residents and one surgeon who tried to discharge a seventy-eight-year-old woman without confirming whether she had stairs at home.
It means she is prepared to wait me out.
I take a sip of coffee. It’s terrible.
“Fine,” I say.
“I haven’t asked anything yet.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to ask whether you wanted some cake.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“No,” she admits. “I wasn’t.”
I set the cup down. “Jamie was difficult.”
Keisha waits.
“Stubborn.”
She takes a spoonful of yogurt.
“Overconfident.”
Another spoonful.
“He asked too many questions.”
“That’s usually a good thing.”
“Not when half of them are creative attempts to negotiate his way around medical restrictions.”
“Fair.”
“He thinks pain is an inconvenience instead of information. He apologizes every time he needs help. And he watches everything.”
Keisha lowers the spoon. “Watches everything?”
I look down at my coffee. “He notices people. Whether Coach has eaten. Whether the rookie who called is upset. Whether the nurses are tired. Whether someone is pretending not to worry.”
“Whether you always miss the same piece of hair when you tuck it back?”
My gaze snaps up. “How do you know about that?”
“I have eyes.”
“He mentioned it once.”
Keisha leans back in her chair. “Did he?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. Because I don’t know. And that is the problem.
Jamie had been my patient. The lines should have been obvious.
Clean. Professional. I checked his vitals, reinforced his instructions and made sure he understood what recovery would demand from him.
He argued. I refused to budge. He made jokes when he was afraid.
I pretended not to notice when his humor turned into armor.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, the room stopped feeling like a room I visited. It became part of my day.
Keisha’s voice softens. “You liked him.”
I let out a breath. “I respected him.”
“That wasn’t what I said.”
“I know.”
She waits again. I hate that she is so good at silence.
“He’s exhausting,” I say.
“I’ve heard.”
“He’s stubborn.”
“You mentioned that.”
“He never stops asking questions.”
“Also covered.”
I wrap both hands around the coffee cup even though it has already gone lukewarm.
The truth lands quietly between us.
Keisha does not tease me this time. “That makes sense,” she says.
“It shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was here less than a week.”
“A lot can happen in a week.”
“He was injured. Vulnerable. Away from home. That changes how people connect.”
“It can.”
“And I was part of his care team.”
“You were.”
“I am starting a sports rehabilitation rotation next week. I cannot be distracted by a patient I may never see again.”
Keisha lifts one eyebrow. “May never see again?”
I look away. She knows. Of course she knows. Everyone on the floor seems to know everything within twenty minutes, no matter how quietly the information is shared.
“My placement will probably be at Walker Rehabilitation,” I sigh.
“The facility in Frostholm.”
“Yes.”
“The one Jamie Walker is likely to use.”
“There are other facilities.”
“Are there?”
“Yes.”
“Name one.”
I glare at her. Keisha laughs. “All right. I’ll stop.”
“You will not.”
“No. But I’ll pretend for thirty seconds.”
The possibility has been sitting in the back of my mind since I learned about the rotation. I tried not to think about it when I told Jamie. Tried not to notice how his whole face changed when he realized we might see each other again.
He smiled. It wasn’t the careful smile he used when pain was climbing. Not the dry, crooked one that usually came before a joke. A real smile.
Broad enough that I felt it somewhere beneath my ribs. Which is ridiculous.
“He seemed happy about it,” Keisha says.
I narrow my eyes. “Were you listening outside the ambulance bay?”
“No. But you came back inside looking like somebody had handed you good news and told you not to open it yet.”
I stare at her. “That is alarmingly specific.”
“I’m an excellent nurse.”
“You are nosy.”
“Also, true.”
She reaches across the table and taps one finger against my coffee cup. “You don’t have to decide what it means today.”
“It does not mean anything.”
“Then you don’t have to decide that either.”
I look at her hand, then at her face. Keisha’s expression is gentle now. No teasing. No knowing smile. Just friendship, the kind that tells the truth without demanding an answer.
“I don’t want to be foolish,” I admit.
“Thinking about someone isn’t foolish.”
“It can become foolish.”
“So can trying too hard not to.”
A call light sounds down the hall. Keisha glances toward the door and stands. “That’ll be Mr. I-Can-Put-On-My-Own-Socks.”
“I should get back too.”
She tosses her yogurt container into the trash. “For the record, I liked him.”
“You spoke to him twice.”
“Three times. And he thanked me every time I helped him.”
“He apologizes too much.”
“Maybe. But men who notice the people taking care of them are rare.”
I do not answer. Keisha opens the door, then looks back at me.
“And Annette?”
“Yes?”
“Your face does that little soft thing every time you say his name.”
“My face does not do a thing.”
“It really does.” She disappears into the hall before I can defend myself.
I remain in the break room for another few seconds.
Jamie.
I say his name silently just to prove Keisha wrong, then catch my reflection in the dark microwave door. My expression is softer.
“Traitor,” I mutter to my own face.
By the end of the shift, Room 312 is no longer empty.
A new patient arrives shortly after lunch. Older man. Hip replacement. Anxious wife. Three grown children who all speak at once and ask the same questions in slightly different ways.
The room fills quickly.
A suitcase lands in the chair where Coach sat. Flowers appear on the windowsill. The television plays a little too loudly. Someone asks for another blanket.
The hospital moves forward because that is what hospitals do. Beds fill. Charts change. Names disappear from the board and are replaced by new ones.
By six o’clock, there is no visible sign Jamie Walker was ever there. I pause outside the doorway on my way to the elevator. Only for a second.
The new patient’s wife is helping him adjust his tray table. One of the daughters is arguing with the parking app on her phone. A nurse I barely know is explaining the pain schedule.
Life has already moved into the space he left behind. I should find that reassuring. Instead, I feel the strangest little ache. Get a grip, Annette. I whisper.
The elevator doors open. Outside, the late-afternoon air is sharp enough to sting my cheeks. Snow has started again, fine white flakes drifting beneath the parking lot lights.
I pull my coat tighter and head toward my car. Halfway there, my phone feels heavy in my pocket. I tell myself I am checking the time.
I am not. Jamie’s contact information is still in my phone from discharge coordination. I open it before I can talk myself out of it.
Jamie Walker. A phone number. Nothing else. My thumb hovers over the message icon. I could ask whether the flight went well, if his pain is manageable, whether he remembered his breathing exercises.
All perfectly reasonable questions. All questions someone else on his official care team can ask.
I open the message box.
Type, How was the flight?
Stare at it.
Delete it.
“He was a patient,” I remind the empty parking lot.
The words sound sensible. Professional. Safe.
I slide the phone back into my pocket and unlock the car. Somewhere between the hospital and Frostholm, Jamie Walker is probably arguing with Coach, ignoring at least one instruction and pretending he is not worried about the team.
The thought brings a small smile before I can stop it.
I hope Walker Rehabilitation assigns him to me.